Burgas Alexandroupolis Oil Pipeline
The Burgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline was a pipeline project that was intended to connect the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas with the Greek port of Alexandroupoli on the Aegean Sea . Bulgaria's exit in 2011 caused the project to fail.
It would be used to transport oil from Russia , Kazakhstan and the Caucasus Republics. With it, the oil transport through the straits in Turkey , the Bosporus and the Dardanelles could be avoided. On the one hand, the sea route through the Turkish straits is already busy. There could be costly waiting times for tankers. On the other hand, the passage through the straits, especially through the Bosporus in the metropolis of Istanbul , some of which is only a few hundred meters wide, is risky. If a tanker has an accident, great damage could be caused.
Construction planning and technical characteristics
Construction of the approximately 262 km long pipeline with a diameter of 1000 mm (42 inches) was originally scheduled to begin in 2008 and be completed in 2011. Later schedules provided for construction to begin in 2011 and commissioning from 2014.
Its initial capacity should be 35 million tons of crude oil per year. When completed, the pipeline should transport up to 50 million tons of crude oil.
The project included the expansion of the Burgas oil port so that oil tankers with a capacity of up to 150,000 tons can dock in Burgas . As an alternative in Burgas for the unloading of the tankers and as the only variant in Alexandroupoli for the loading of the tankers (in Alexandroupoli with a size of up to 320,000 tons), loading buoys ( single buoy moorings , SBM) were planned, which allow tanker handling at intervals of approx. Plan 10–12 km from the coast.
Owners of the pipeline company
The majority of the Transbalkan Oil Pipeline Company are held by the Russian state-owned companies Rosneft , Transneft and Gazprom Neft with 51% .
Bulgarian and Greek companies each own 24.5%. On the Greek side, this is the joint venture Greece Bapline consortium , in which Hellenic Petroleum , the Latsis group , Petroleum Gas and the Greek state (1%) hold shares. On the Bulgarian side, it is the "Project company Burgas - Alexandroupolis BG", in which the state-owned companies "Bulgargas" and "Technoexportstroj" EAD each hold half.
The pipeline company has been registered as an offshore company in the Netherlands .
Other oil pipelines in the Black Sea / Turkey area
The BTC Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is already available for the transport of crude oil from the Caspian region to the west . It leads from Azerbaijan through Georgia to the south coast of Turkey to Ceyhan .
A pipeline from Burgas to the Adriatic Sea , the AMBO oil pipeline, is also being discussed .
Protests
Since 2008 , resistance to the oil pipeline has been particularly intense in the Bulgarian Black Sea communities of Burgas , Pomorie and Sozopol . Local and national politicians took up the project, including the nationalist Ataka party . The opaque politics of the government under Sergei Stanishev and Putin, as well as domestic political struggles in the run-up to the parliamentary elections in 2009, led to the first citizens' petitions in the history of the Republic of Bulgaria and protests by environmentalists. The problem questions are how and where the oil in the Bay of Burgas gets from the tankers to the pipeline and how the oil pipeline passes through the largest protected area in Bulgaria - the Strandscha nature park and the protected lake landscape of Burgasseen . Public hearings carried out by the project executing agency in order to present the project in detail and to answer questions ended in disaster, as the representatives of the project executing agency did not have a say and were downright shouted down by the attending visitors, among them strong representatives of the hotel lobby.
To calm the mood, the Trans Balkan Pipeline operating consortium launched the Internet portal Istinata za Projekta (Bulgarian Истината за проекта, in German: The Truth About the Project) in 2010 .
In mid-December 2011, the Bulgarian government announced its unilateral withdrawal from the project.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Russian Balkan Pipeline to Bypass Turkey www.sws.org
- ↑ Portal Istinata za Projekta ( Memento from May 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive )